Really?
For those who haven't seen it or read it:
PETER FITZSIMONS: Ladies and gentlemen of Australia, inside every fat man, there's a thin man trying to get out.
JOE HOCKEY: Yeah... Before and after shot.
PETER: Joe Hockey loves his footy...he loves his farm...and he loves his family. And until recently, he could have loved food for Australia...but not any more. Now, he hardly has the stomach for it.
JOE: I always loved food and I have always loved food but you know, it was... it was killing me.
PETER: In the alphabet of adjectives...Joe Hockey gets all the feel-good ones. Affable, authentic...cuddly and kind to name but a few. So the question has to be asked. If his party wins, does the shadow treasurer have the ticker for one of Australia's toughest jobs? Does Joe have that streak of bastardry in him? Because I haven't seen it.
DAVID KOCH: No.
PETER: There is a strong body of opinion that while Joe is very liked, very popular, there's also a feeling that he's too nice to take savage decisions.
MELISSA: Mmm.
PETER: Do you think maybe your husband's too nice to take savage decisions?
MELISSA: I don't think he would ever be too nice to take the right decisions.
PETER: Now, a confession. Joe and I have been great mates for nearly three decades. Our politics are sometimes poles apart but we share the same passions. So I'm going to introduce you to the man I know. Father of three, husband to Melissa, the much-loved son of Richard. His dad was born in Bethlehem, a staunch Catholic and proud Palestinian who fell in love with Australia. Dad ran a small business, Joe shares his values...
JOE: Business is the backbone of the Australian economy.
PETER: ..and Melissa has made all the money. Until recently, she was a top executive with Deutsche Bank. Would it be fair to say that in your married life together, Melissa's earned three times what you've earned, 5 times what you've earned, 10 times what you've earned?
JOE: I'm sure you've out-earned me every year. Almost every year. I don't know how much she's earned. I don't know. And I've - yeah, absolutely, deliberately - I don't want to know if she owns shares or what the situation is because I think it puts me in a conflict position.
PETER: So Melissa makes the investments but doesn't tell you "We're into BHP and we're out of..."
JOE: No, it doesn't...
MELISSA: Correct.
PETER: But I put it to you that you're a kept man?
JOE: Well, I'm patron of the kept man club but that allows me to do what I have to do for my country.
PETER: They met at a Young Liberal convention 21 years ago.
JOE: I went "Wow! She's alright" so, yeah, I ended up marrying her.
PETER: And had you been a ladies man before that point? Had you had a string of relationships or this was...?
JOE: No, no - this is the first girl I've ever gone out with. No! First girl I kissed. You're right, no.
PETER: How did you...?
JOE: That's my line and I'm sticking to it!
MELISSA: And I've believed him all these years.
PETER: Two years later, they were married. Two years after that, he was an MP. It was 1996 and Joe won the federal seat of North Sydney. He was 31.
JOE: Mr Acting Speaker, I am in Canberra today because I want to make a contribution to the future of Australia.
PETER: When you met Joe, was Joe slim or big?
MELISSA: In-between.
PETER: Right. Have you had many conversations over the years where you said "Joe, no more pie for you?"
JOE: Yes, I'll answer that. Yes...
PETER: Did you have hurtful moments when you were 12, 13? Do you have a seed in your memory, "Joe's a fat kid?"
JOE: Oh, always.
PETER: Was it or not? Did it hurt?
JOE: Oh... People have had a shot over the years. Look, I've been fat all my life and I made a decision that I had to take control of my life and be at my best.
PETER: At his heaviest, Joe Hockey weighed in at 138kg. While good mates like David Koch would joke about it...
DAVID: I almost thought we had to get Greenpeace there to drag you out.
PETER: ..they were also worried about him.
JOE: It was very hard doing Kokoda weighing 135kg. Probably halfway. The air's a little thinner. A cracker of a headache. And it was very hard climbing Mount Kilimanjaro weighing the same and it's very hard when you are in good health to undertake such a significant operation that will change your life forever.
PETER: The operation is called a vertical sleeve gastrectomy. It permanently removes 80% of the stomach. What's left is about the size of a banana which means you simply can't eat as much food. Why do you think such a radical solution as major surgery instead of the normal solution which is to push away the third serving of pie?
DAVID: I've actually asked him that and I didn't get a convincing answer. But I think probably he didn't trust himself that he could change his behaviour to the extent he wanted to and with the schedule he's got, to really make a massive difference quickly.
PETER: What do you think turned Joe around?
DAVID: One single comment from Adelaide, his daughter.
JOE: Adelaide came up to me one day and said "Daddy, will you be around for my marriage?" and I thought, come on, you know, you're five years of age. And then I thought a bit more about it and I spoke to my doctor and I said "You know, she's five years of age - will I be around for her wedding?" and he said "Well, if you are, you'll be in poor health". He said "Look, these are the risks - one, two, three, four, five." And I said "Well, I've got to do something about it."
PETER: Just before Christmas last year, Joe Hockey bid farewell to most of his tummy. On the very morning he went under the knife, I pleaded with him to reconsider the radical operation and he flat-out ignored me. From memory, it was a Monday morning.
JOE: 18 December. And then discharged from hospital on the Thursday to go and do a press conference about Wayne Swan dumping the surplus...
MELISSA: Yeah, that was hard.
JOE: ..and I could barely stand up. I was falling apart and I was bleeding through the shirt.
TONY ABBOTT: Well, Joe, you are absolutely and totally vindicated.
JOE: Thanks very much, Tony. And I'm sad, in a sense, that I am because, as you said, this was a fundamental commitment by the Government.
PETER: Had you told Tony Abbott before surgery?
JOE: No.
PETER: Why not?
JOE: None of his business. It was no-one's business. And, you know, it was my decision and I had to be accountable for it and I had to do it. It was the right thing to do.
PETER: Since then, Joe has lost 30 kilos. He's almost back to his old rugby-playing weight and when he Tony Abbott first met and clashed at Sydney University in the mid 1980s. Joe was in third grade, Tony was player-coach for the seconds and Joe was upset that Coach Abbott wouldn't pick him.
JOE: So, I had a little you know, I thought, we'd have some set piece scrum between second and third grade, Tony packed down and I thought I'd give him a little jab, you know, and I went straight for his kidneys and he didn't like it. He - that's about all I remembered actually. I didn't see it coming but it wasn't a haymaker. It hit.
PETER: He's an Oxford Blue in boxing.
JOE: I didn't know that at the time! No-one told me he was a boxer when I took him on.
PETER: Were you briefly knocked out?
JOE: Yeah! I remember him standing over me saying "Mate, mate, sorry about that". But I deserved it.
PETER: A lot of people don't like your leader but they like you. Do you agree?
JOE: No. I like my leader. And I think others do too. You know, the people that know Tony Abbott like him and I think people will be - if we are elected on September 7, I think people will be really pleasantly surprised about Tony Abbott, Prime Minister.
PETER: So tell me, no joking. Why are you here? What do you want to do?
JOE: I want to make Australia better. I've got a great debt to repay to this nation for what it did for my family and you know, it's the best place on earth, mate.
PETER: After World War II, the great Labor prime minister, Ben Chifley put out the welcome mat to hundreds of thousands of immigrants wanting to come to Australia. One of them was Joe's father. He arrived in 1948 and, to this day, loves the man who let him in, Prime Minister Joseph Benedict Chifley. Today, Joseph Benedict Hockey is visiting his mum and dad. For much of his life, Richard Hockey ran a suburban real estate agency. Joe remembers tough times. In 1974, when Labor was in power, his father almost went broke.
JOE: Dad came home one night and said "We're going to lose it all. We're not going to get there". It was my mother who said "We are. We're all going to work." So all of us, each of the four kids, were given a job and my job was to sweep out the front of the shop and cut out the ads out of the Saturday paper.
PETER: Did your father and mother vote Liberal?
JOE: Yeah, my mum's always voted Liberal, apart from one occasion, and...
PETER: What was that?
JOE: It was when my brother was drafted for Vietnam. It was the only time she changed her vote.
PETER: So she voted for Gough?
JOE: Yep. Only time.
PETER: What about your father?
JOE: Ah, well, Dad, for a while there, was in the Labor Party but my mum wore him down.
PETER: Tell me about your dad.
JOE: Well, he's my hero. He's an inspiring figure. If I can be half the father to my children that he has been to me, then I would have been a very decent and good man.
PETER: Joe Hockey can play partisan politics as hard as anyone. He knows the value of the stinging one-liner.
JOE: Ease up, Kevin, relax, mate, relax, OK? OK. You're only adding to the wind down in Geelong.
PETER: Yet through all that, his sparring partners are also often his mates. Seven years ago, on the way to Kokoda, he lent Kevin Rudd a helping hand.
JOE: Should I let him go now? I thought for a brief moment, "Should I save him, should I not save him, Should I save him?" And I still wonder about that today.
PETER: Not everyone has forgiven him for it. If you hadn't grabbed him, what then? What would have happened?
JOE: Oh, I don't know, he would have floated down the river and hopefully, you know, got stuck under a rock. I bet Julia Gillard wishes I had have drowned him.
PETER: Hugely successful leaders tend to have at least a streak of bastardry in them. Does Joe have it? Because I haven't seen it?
DAVID: No. He doesn't have it and if the Australian public change their view of politicians, and wanted somebody who was believable and reasonable, Joe would be the perfect leader. I must admit, I reckon he would be a sensational leader. But whether he's got the killer instinct and whether you need it to be a good leader is the issue. And I don't think he's got it. He's just too measured, too nice a bloke, too compassionate a bloke.
PETER: A common theme of people that know you, like you and love you is "Great man, Joe - just not sure if he's got the killer instinct."
JOE: Try me.
PETER: Far, far away from Canberra, Joe Hockey has found a place to unwind.
JOE: This is a spiritual home. It's peaceful, it's natural, you know, it's great.
PETER: A 200-hectare cattle farm, 120km west of Cairns. He and Melissa bought it seven years ago. It's about as far from Canberra as you can get while still being in Australia. On the east coast, isn't it?
JOE: Yeah, it's pretty much.. .it's rich land, it's drought-proof. You know, you've got tree wallabies, you've got platypus in the creeks. You've got all the wildlife of the earth here and it's really God's garden.
PETER: And the cattle - you must be making a fortune!
JOE: There's no fortunes in cattle, mate. Well, we haven't got the scale but, you know, it's a reminder to the kids where food comes from. This is important. This is what Australia is about - about getting the balance right between Mother Nature and food production and taking care of country.
PETER: With Joe, beyond politics and family, what is the great passion of this man's life?
JOE: You can say it, go on.
MELISSA: This is not one we share, necessarily, but 'Seinfeld'.
PETER: The most famous 'Seinfeld' episode of all is 'The Soup Nazi'. If you become Federal Treasurer, there's going to be a long queue of people wanting economic soup. You are going to have to say, "No soup for you today!"
JOE: No soup for you. Well, you know, if there's no money, if there's no soup in the soup kitchen, you can't hand anything out.
PETER: Can you say there will be no GST rise in an Abbott government?
JOE: There will be no increase or change to the GST, full stop. That's what we've said, we'll say it again.
PETER: This weekend, there are 80,000 leaflets going into every mailbox in your electorate targeting you for your opposition to gay marriage. Have you made the wrong call there?
JOE: No, no. I know how hard it is for a lot of people who are gay who want to marry their lifetime partner, but it is my view. It is my personal view that a marriage is between a man and a woman.
PETER: Do you think Tony Abbott said this week, that it's just the fashion of the moment?
JOE: No, he was taken completely out of context, if you actually read the whole transcript. He was on to another subject which was tradition and, you know, I regret that he has been taken out of context.
PETER: Is that because he is a suppository of wisdom?
JOE: No, that wasn't taken out of context. That's the only time I've actually heard him use an incorrect term but it was a cracker.
PETER: Should you be announced as the federal treasurer, will your first call be to your father? "Dad, guess what?"
JOE: Sure.
PETER: How will you feel?
Good.
How will he feel?
JOE: Proud.
PETER: Good on you, Joe.
JOE: Let me up. That's a bit hard! Thanks. Appreciate you giving me the opportunity.
